 Hi everyone, it's Shay again with Alden Series. Today we have some special guests from the communications department. We have Professor Aiden and his students and we also have Bill from the archive department. So I'm just going to give a brief description of what they do here on campus and they're going to talk about their communications capstone project. So hello everyone. Hi. How are you? Good. So you can just give a brief description of what you do on campus and what the project is. The project is designed to have students working in teams give walking tours that are historically based about different parts of campus. We've got five teams of five students in the class and each of them has one part of campus and they've been working all semester long to research the history of some of the places in their areas on campus and then to develop an interesting compelling walking tour about why those places are important and memorable. So what would you say like triggered this idea for this project? I love history. I love places and I'm in the School of Communication Studies and they all come together. They reflect in a lot of ways my research interest is to I'm interested in and why we remember certain places and how then we choose to remember out of everything that's available what we do about those places. So this is a nice for me combination of my research interests and being able to put that into the classroom. Awesome. So I know you guys invited alumni to like share their stories and things like that so how did you all reach out to them and get them to participate? The Alumni Relations Office was instrumental. They were excited about the project and so I simply asked them can you send out an email to alumni. They did. Alumni responded tremendously. We had over 250 alum share stories with us about places that they remembered on campus that still lingered with them today. Awesome. Was there any like popular story or anything that stood out to you or any of you guys? A lot of people talked about College Green. College Green was a big one. I also saw a lot of Jefferson Hall and like the old dining hall that used to be in Jeff. That's cool. That's cool. The same thing specifically that I mean they're like first love there or just... Actually there were when I was sifting through the stories there were a few that was like oh like and I did this with my then girlfriend now wife or like then friend now wife kind of thing. And for the students so what would you say are some of the challenging parts of the actual research you know just compiling everything and figuring out how to you know pin the historic factors of the project? I think it has to do with figuring out what you want the theme of the tour to be first and from there you can you can acquire the research and how it needs to be. I think that's the difficult part. Yep. So if you can give just like a verbal description how would you say that how does the tour go? It depends on the group because themes can be different. Mine is South Green so our theme is why South Green isn't only the newest green but also the best green for students on campus. Okay. And what would you say how does this differentiate from other big projects that you've been involved in? I feel like there's a lot more components to it like if it's just like a big like research project you just have to read you know do a bunch of research write a 10 page paper and turn it in. This involves like hours and hours of research as well as reaching out to the community members and to the alumni and then also kind of combining that information into like a five to 70 minute portion of a tour and then giving that tour. It's just there's a lot of different components to it. And with and also with reaching out it also makes the project that much more intimate as well. And Bill, you being the Archive Specialist, how what did you do to contribute to like you know the students research? How would you help out? I mainly just showed them where the sources were and they knew they had their goals they knew what they were looking for I just had to show them where we for instance where we have records on the various buildings where we have records on the various people for whom the buildings were named and then other things like newspaper articles and yearbooks all those types of sources where they would find a lot of these stories about the history of the University. Awesome. And back to the students, so would you say it was more of an enjoyable project or was it tedious you know? Could wait to get it done or was it actually fun? I've really enjoyed it. I've really enjoyed it. There have been a few tedious parts like one of the buildings I'm doing is Putnam Hall and Putnam Hall has over like a hundred years of like data on it when it was like an elementary school and all that and just kind of like sifting through that and figuring out exactly what to use has been really tedious but I think overall I've enjoyed it. I've enjoyed it a lot. It all depends I think on your outlook whenever I do a research project I like really get into it and because it's just new new information about like my University. So this question is for anyone so what do you want like the students or faculty or anyone that is to school or just anybody like what do you want them to take from this project and all the research and things like that? Well the goal is that the material that the students have created through all their work this semester doesn't stop at the end of the semester that the University can use that information and the work that they've done to help tell the story of the University in a more historical manner that can be through guided tours or it could be through a self-guided walking tour as well. The students have taken the stories that alumns have contributed as well as some of the archival images that they've collected and put them on a site that's called historypin.org and so students and anyone interested in the history of the University then could go there and take their own tour of the history of the University see those images from the archives read the stories from alumni. So our hope is that all of this hard work continues to live on in various ways either through admissions, alumni, any sorts of offices on campus that think that the material could be useful. Awesome so is this a project that only students can get involved in? One of the cool things about historypin is that it's crowdsourced. The tours themselves that you can have a collection of items on historypin or you can put a single item or you can create a tour. If you create a tour you're the only one who can control that tour so we're the only ones who have the material accessible for the tour but once somebody goes on historypin and takes the tour then if they think oh that was cool I want to share my experience they can pin that or put that on the map themselves so other people then once they're looking for Ohio University if they see our tours that the students created then they might put additional information stories or images from their past that other people can then experience and ideally this is just the first step in giving Ohio University history and not just the facts about in this date this happened but really the emotional history what makes this place so compelling for so many students and alumni over the years and so that everyone then can see what OU is like and what OU feels like and has always felt like for those people who have come here. I have something to say about it. This has been one of the most fun experiences of my life as being an archivist here is having these students come in and they were regularly coming in here day after day we had a group in here until six o'clock last night and it was fun because they would find facts and then they would they were sharing them with each other oh look I found it was just really kind of neat seeing students access this stuff and sharing information with each other and then trying to figure out how they're gonna make sense of it and something like this and as I say I attended the first one today it wasn't with Devin and Dill and you guys are doing yours another time but I attended the first one today it was for the athletic complex and I was I was pretty impressed with what the students did I thought they they were I think we all learned something from it I think that was one of the main things and I think they you know despite a little bit of nervousness it seemed like they had some fun doing it. I definitely feel like this is a project that a lot of people you know can take something from it. Well thank you guys if anyone else has any comments you can leave us remarks in the comment section you can find this video on YouTube if you have any questions you can speak to the students, Bill and Professor Aiden so thank you.